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Loading... Choke : A Novelby Chuck Palahniuk
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I'm not sure what to make of this book. I thought it was suppose to be humorous but I didn't find it funny. It's just a sad commentary on a sex addict with a schizophrenic/bipolar mom. I sure as hell wouldn't want to see the movie! (  ) FMRox | Dec 23, 2009 |  Raucous, satiric and scatalogical, with an anti-hero who starts out hard to love, as he tries to game the system by scamming strangers for pity and support, while dulling the feeling of despair with a variety of addictions and subversive behavior. I was really surprised to like it very much. From the back cover: "Victor Mancini, a medical school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times." (  ) ffortsa | Dec 22, 2009 | I'm not really sure if Chuck's I'm-so-out-there-dude really works for me any more, but hearing him read the book really brought to light how well put-together the cadence of his prose is. Who knew? ( ) theanalogdivide | Dec 1, 2009 | I'm not really sure if Chuck's I'm-so-out-there-dude really works for me any more, but hearing him read the book really brought to light how well put-together the cadence of his prose is. Who knew? ( ) theanalogdivide | Dec 1, 2009 | I'm not really sure if Chuck's I'm-so-out-there-dude really works for me any more, but hearing him read the book really brought to light how well put-together the cadence of his prose is. Who knew? ( ) theanalogdivide | Dec 1, 2009 | 
 Choke seizes the dirty truth disguised beneath our modern glamours and screams it loudly into your ear. You may find yourself feeling unusually militant after reading Choke – consider this a warning.  In Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 cult novel ''Fight Club,'' a young man escapes the emasculating boredom of modern life by indulging his violent, antisocial impulses. Victor Mancini, the narrator of Palahniuk's energetic, exasperating new book, also keeps in close touch with his inner bad boy, though what it is he's trying to escape is less clear. His operating principle is ''What would Jesus NOT do?'' ''If you're going to read this, don't bother.'' So Chuck Palahniuk introduces the reader to Choke, showcasing the punkish style of his fourth novel from line one. The narrator, Victor Mancini, continues: ''After a couple pages, you won't want to be here,'' he warns. ''Save yourself.'' The hero's warning is the author's awkward wink, and there, in the third paragraph, you have the story's over-worked theme: salvation.  So ''Choke'' is an uneven but still raw and vital book, punctuated with outrageous, off-the-wall moments that work as often as not.
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"Art never comes from happiness." So says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock-full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case. In the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus, and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlich.
Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palahniuk territory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot, but suffice it to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room, and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with Fight Club and the other two novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously unflinching sound bites, including this skeptical bit on prayer chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."
Whether this is the novel that will break Palahniuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end, though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just barely. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does in the final pages: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better.... What it's going to be, I don't know." --Bob Michaels
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:56 -0400)
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